


It's A Symphony

by polytropic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshee!Lydia, Character Study, F/F, Fix-it fic, Journey to the Underworld, Sumerian Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-16 23:18:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4643769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia has a white dress, an iPod and an attitude, and she's going to get her girlfriend back from the dead. </p><p>(Interpretation of the Inanna's Descent myth)</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's A Symphony

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Teen Wolf Femslash Exchange, in response to the prompt "Orpheus-esque Lydia, venturing into the Afterlife to bring Allison back to the living". I know the original request was for Greek mythology, but if we're talking katabasis Inanna is always going to be my girl so I went Sumerian instead. 
> 
> Warnings for: explorations of sexism and femmephobia, psychological attacks, hair cutting, attacks on bodily autonomy, sacrifice. 
> 
> Title comes from "Seven Devils" by Florence and the Machine which I listened to A LOT writing this.

The first gate is under the trellis in Lydia’s garden, where once a dreamy young serial killer handed her a flower and tried to push her boundaries. The vines climbing up it are in bloom, bright white; she ripped out the purple from the roots and re-planted, sweet-smelling and defiantly pure.

She is wearing white, too. There was no requirement, no sly implication of virginity prerequisites; she simply feels a little like this is her wedding day, and at heart Lydia Martin might, appearances to the contrary, be kind of a traditionalist. So she wears a sundress, flared with lace, and shines in the afternoon light.

Kira is not adequately appreciating the picture she makes.

“I really, really, really think this is a bad idea,” she says. When Kira gets worried her eyes go massive and she bites her lip; it’s almost unbearably cute.

“It was _your_ idea,” Lydia reminds her.

“And I’m really, really, really sure it was a bad one. Please let’s ask Deaton about this?”

“Nope.” The light is waning. It’s almost time; Lydia flicks her hair behind her and turns to face the gate. She looks back over her shoulder, to where Kira twisting a hand against the garden wall fretfully. “If I’m not back in three days, get help.”

“You don’t even mean that! You’re only saying it because you have to.”

She’s right, Lydia doesn’t mean a word of it. Three days? When it’s been seven months? She’s coming back with what she came for or she isn’t coming back at all; end of story.

“ _Stop it_!” Lydia blinks and turns back around. She’s not sure she’s ever really heard Kira yell at her before. “Do you think I can’t tell what you’re thinking? Do you think it isn’t obvious that you don’t care if you come back? Am I supposed to just let you leave me behind with ‘get help’ like I don’t know what’s going to happen? Like I don’t know you’ve already decided I’ll fail?”

Kira doesn’t get loud when she gets angry, apparently; her voice goes softer and more gutted instead. Something about the twisted knot of her brow and the distressed clench of her hands tears Lydia up inside, worse that it would be if she shouted. Her gaze, which was fixed far away, focuses back on her garden and her life and the girl who is here because she cares about her, who Lydia brought here because she wouldn’t want anyone else as a lifeline.

“I’m sorry.” Her heels, tall and white, sink into the grass as she crosses to Kira and grabs her hand. “I’m sorry and I won’t do that to you.” Kira lets her tug her forward, lets her pull her in until their foreheads rest together and their breaths mingle. “I am coming back. I will not let that not be true. So if I’m not out in three days, you go to Deaton, you go to Morrell, you go to Scott, go to whoever you have to to get me out.”

“If I can’t—”

“You can.”

“Okay.” Kira takes a deep, shuddery breath and wobbles a smile onto her face. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Lydia presses their foreheads together for a moment longer and then lets go. The sun is in the act of sinking; she can’t afford to wait any longer.

She walks to the gate. It is there and not there, the way these things are; it isn’t a different visual quality or a secret door or anything, it’s more like the feeling of trying to find one’s way through a room in the pitch dark. Stumbling with her hands blindly stretched until the sensation of something on the other side brings the realization of, oh, this is the way out.

Lydia feels the weights in her pockets and the wind in her hair. She hears Kira breathing short and fast behind her, and from in front the sub-audible whining screech of something not of her world. She takes her earbuds out of her pocket and cues up the “Going Down” playlist. Music starts blasting, and Lydia bends down and slips out of the straps of her pumps.

“The way of the underworld,” she tells the gate, and places her shoes carefully down next to her in the grass. She walks forward, barefoot, into hell.

***

Wind hits her hard coming the other way the minute she’s through the gate. It’s overwhelming, the rushing shriek of it and the pressure against her face. She can’t see for a moment, and when she can it’s even more of an overload: there are flying streamers everywhere, great bolts of bright color flapping and whirling in the wind. A vividly red one blows right past her face; on the other side a yellow one folds and snaps, twisting around itself. Everything is color and sound and she doesn’t know where to go.

Lydia takes a deep breath and turns up her iPod. She’s not about to turn back at the first hurdle. She closes her eyes, so all the colors can’t confuse her, and starts walking forward.

The wind gets weaker the further she goes, which she hopes is a good sign. When she no longer feels buffeted by it at all, she opens her eyes. The bright colored banners are still all around but they hang mostly quietly now, only fluttering a little in the weaker gusts. She keeps walking, the smooth featureless floor under her cool on her bare feet. Eventually, she realizes that the streamers are framing a path, almost a processional; she squints down the line, and there, far, far at the end, is the next gate. By the time she’s close there’s no wind at all and the air is eerily still; she finds herself breathing more quickly, as if her lungs aren’t quite sure what they’re getting is air. The blast of music in her ears echoes comfortingly.

This gate actually is a door, tall and dark. Standing next to it are two old men, both with pale skin and hair and a suspicious glare. She marches up to the door, and the one with the uglier nose’s mouth moves like he’s saying something to her.

“Sorry, what?” She pops out her earbuds and takes a moment of quiet delight in the annoyance in his cranky old eyes.

“ID,” he snarls, like the crankiest club bouncer ever. She fishes in the pockets of her dress and extracts her wallet. He extends his bony hand, palm up demandingly and she slaps the little plastic triangle into it. The minute it touches his fingers it disappears.

“Hey!” she objects. “I get that back, right?”

“No,” the other one tells her flatly.

“Why?”

“ _Rules_. Of the underworld,” he says.

She pouts, the same face she would use if someone didn’t let her into the club. They both appear unmoved.

“Fine. Whatever.” She can always get another fake ID. If they expect her to sacrifice her identity, or her name, or her title, they’re going to have to do a lot better than confiscating a $50 investment in buying her own drinks. She makes a show of fishing for her earbuds and replacing them in her ears.

“Hmph.” One old man turns away pointedly. The other one glares at her. The door creaks open.

***

Stepping through the second gate is golden and blinding. She tries to keep her eyes open, not quite convinced it’s safe to pinch them shut. Her eyes ache, sharply and almost overwhelmingly, and then slowly adjust.

The gold is wheat. An endless field of it, it seems like, stretching out to the horizons in every direction she can see. Unbroken waves drift slowly in the wind, mesmerizingly in sync. She runs her hand over the closest plant; the chaff is dry and scratchy under her fingers. It’s scratchy under her feet, too, and against her bare legs. When she takes a hesitant step forward—how is she supposed to know which way to go?—a stalk slides against her bare thigh, leaving an itch behind.

She stands on her tiptoes, cranes her neck to try to see farther. Unyielding gold, everywhere she looks. Her toes dig into the rich black earth underneath her. Where is the next gate? Should she have brought a compass? Would it even help? She thinks about trying the GPS app on her phone, but that just seems too far-fetched. It’s not like this place is mapable by satellites.

She picks a direction at random, starts walking. The wheat slaps at her legs as she goes, and the dirt squishes underneath her. She walks for perhaps three minutes—one complete song on her iPod—and then pauses. Behind her the wheat is unmarred by her passage. When she bends down to check, there are no footprints in the soil. She isn’t going anywhere.

“What the fuck,” she whispers, frustrated. This isn’t something she came prepared to handle. She assumed the way, at least, would be obvious.

Experimentally, she grabs the stalk nearest to her right hand and tries pulling it out of the ground. It doesn’t budge. She can’t tear it with her fingers, either. Next she bends down and tries to dig around it, hoping to get it up by the roots…and to her surprise, the soil gives way under her fingers. She’s able to scoop up large handfuls of it, and even though no matter how far she digs she can’t seem to find the end of the wheat’s roots, at least she’s _able_ to dig.

Huh. Lydia sits back, experiencing a momentary twinge of regret at how the dirt is staining her lovely white dress, and thinks. She can’t go anywhere walking, but she apparently can dig down.

Well. Down is, after all, the name of the game. She pops out her earbuds for ease of motion and sets to it systematically, scooping the dirt out and piling it by the side of the ever-growing hole. She widens the hole as she goes down, until eventually she’s standing in a crater about waist-height and flinging the dirt out past her head. That’s when her fingers hit something hard, and she gasps out a “motherfucker!” at how it jars.

“Rude,” says something inside the hole. Lydia stares for a moment, then clears the dirt off of where the voice came from. It’s a face, molded in metal and about half her height in diameter, but it has two sets of eyes and two noses, reflected over the axis of its single, wide mouth like a weird Escher print. Its features are smooth but somehow a little grotesque. She ends up standing on one of its noses, for lack of a better place to put her feet, and gazing down at it.

“Phone please.” The mouth moves when it speaks, flopping open and shut more like flesh than metal.

“Rude yourself, why do you need my phone?” she protests. It’s not that she’s going to really use it down here, but her phone gives her a sense of security. It has her emergency contacts and the internet and her selfies and all the little technological supports that make her feel like she can handle things if they come up.

“Way of the underworld.” The mouth and both sets of eyes smirk at her.

“Informative.” She takes her phone out of her pocket. After a moment of consideration, she snaps a selfie with the weird metal gatekeeper. She can’t exactly upload it anywhere, but at least she can _say_ she took the picture. Then she places the phone on the thing’s forehead, where it disappears. The face smiles, way, way too broadly, and Lydia shivers. The mouth just keeps widening, and she realizes what is happening only a moment before it opens up under her feet. There’s a terrible moment of sucking _nothing_ underneath her, and Lydia falls.

***

The spray hits her face before she realizes she’s landed, cool and shocking. She blinks and it comes into focus, a tower of rushing water so tall she cannot see the top, just white plumes flying. At the bottom the waterfall flows out into a pool, deep and very dark. She stands at the edge, the wet grass tickling her feet.

“Wash that shit off your face.”

She looks down. The voice came from a frog, which isn’t what she was expecting, though it does explain the harsh croak of the sound. It is sitting on a rock at the edge of the pool, and next to it is a salamander, equally slimy. Gross.

“Why?” she asks.

“The way of the underworld,” it tells her, pebbly green-brown eyes bulging. The tone is knowing, carries in it the echo of every other time she’s been told to take off her makeup by teachers and boyfriends and her father. She knows how this goes, though. She did her research. If they tell you to take it off, that means it had power. To her, that feels like victory; she smirks at the creatures, the bright slash of her mouth smug and flawless, and bends to the pool.

The water is icy cold when she trails a hand through it. When she rubs wet fingers along her mouth they come away stained bright red, cakey. It washes into the pool and is gone; briefly Lydia wishes she could bottle that level of makeup-removing efficiency, instead of scrubbing at her face every night with cleanser. She dips her fingers in again, rubs again; her eyeshadow swirls down into the depths. Dip, rub; mascara. Dip, rub: eyeliner. Dip, rub: blush. The final splash, from both her cupped hands, washes away her foundation.

A ‘plop’ next to her alerts her that the frog and salamander have gone, just a ripple left behind from where they must have dived. When she looks up the waterfall has opened, a thin crack of darkness between its rushing waves. She hikes up her dress, replaces her earbuds, turns her music back on, and wades into the pool and through the fourth gate.

***

She emerges into a school hallway. Not her school; the basic elements are the same, doors and lockers and off behind her a stairwell, but the lockers are featureless and identical and the doors are empty behind the glass. The floor is not scuffed and none of the walls are stained or dented. This is a school made like a TV set, the image of high-school-ness without the substance.

Something behind her snatches at the cord in her earbuds and drags them from her ears. It’s sudden, painful, and most of all a boundary violation of the most alarming sort: too close, to jarring, way too much attack on her most vulnerable spots and headspace.

“Ow!” she yelps.

“Aw is she gonna cry?”

By this time she’s expecting the two figures when she turns, and by the tone of the sneered comment she knows what she’ll find. Her, basically, or a version of her straight out of the Mean Girl Barbie factory. Tall girls with smooth skin, artful hair and well-coordinated outfits.

Lydia’s hair is matted from the wind and damp from the waterfall. Her white dress has streaks of dirt and the hem is soaked and algae-stained. Her makeup is washed away, and she’s barefoot.

“Is there a word stronger than tragic for this?” the girl with darker skin inquires idly. The other one, with long waves of chestnut hair, reaches out and tugs on one of Lydia’s deflating curls, way too hard.

“Like, crime scene.”

“I’d say someone partied a little too hard—”

“—but there’s no stretch of the imagination that lets me believe you get invited to parties.”

Lydia has thrown some great parties in her time, actually, and basic little brats who dress like they just learned what Cosmo is wouldn’t have been in appearance. She opens her mouth to inform these girls of that fact, and their eyes suddenly flash, terrifying and inhumanly red.

“Don’t you say a _word_ , bitch.”

“Yeah. That’s the way we do it here.”

Ah. She gets it. This is a more insubstantial sacrifice than the others, but she supposes that if you asked her to lay down her weapons, this is what you would mean.

Lydia knows each move, each step in this dance. She can heft the blade of that popped hip, that tossed hair; has swung that pointed tone and eyebrow raise with ease a thousand times and watched it wound. She is an expert, long practiced, in this very particular art of war.

However, Lydia is also long done with this knockoff, manufactured darkness. She has tasted too much real blood to have any interest in metaphorical claws. She will emerge into sunlight and she plans to stay there the rest of her days, she is ready for a lifetime of bright, vicious kindness with none of the shit she used to love to stir. She will lay down her arms here with ease because they are far, far too small for her: she is a grown damn woman and her hands are ready for an adult-sized sword by now.

She smiles, and replaces her earbuds in her ears. Waves a hand in a regal “go on then” sort of gesture, and feels triumph and relief when their eyes narrow.

To her left a locker creaks open, swirling darkness beyond it. She climbs in and the girls, laughing, slam the door behind her.

***

This room is blank and white and the edges are rounded. In the middle is a chair, and on either side of the chair are shapes of grey, vaguely humanoid but mostly just boring. Fuzzy outlines like a three-dimension etch-a-sketch, oooh she’s scared.

There are restraints on the arms of the chair. She is, perhaps, a little bit scared after all. She pauses her music, her instincts saying that she wants all senses at full attention right now.

“Sit down,” they say, their featureless faces somehow severe.

“Why?” Her voice only quavers a little.

“The way of the underworld.”

She has to do it now, if she wants to move forward. That’s how it works. Obey the rules or turn around and go home. Lydia seats herself in the chair, grips the arms hard enough her knuckles bulge white, and waits.

She feels a buzz of it at the back of her neck, and she freezes, every muscle in her body going taut. She was ready for a lot of things. She did not consider this.

They shave her hair.

She cries when she sees the first lock slide down her shoulder and puddle on the ground. It is soft and sinuous, and it was part of her, still attached and integral to her body. Her crown, dashed to the ground and swept away like trash. Sitting still and letting them cut it off is one of the hardest things she has ever done. Every moment in the chair roils her stomach harder; her shoulders ache from the tension of holding in place.

When it is done her head is too, too light, wobbly on her neck. She raises her chin as high as she can, presses her lips together until it stings so as not to let the sobs out. She lets the tears fall. When she steps forward her feet slide through red-gold whorls and she bites her cheek so hard she tastes blood. She will remember how her hair felt against her bare ankles, she promises herself. She will remember every day until it has grown back.

There are things that would have been crueler for them to do than silently stare at her as she walks through the gate. They could have laughed. They could have told her she was making a big deal out of something trivial. At least, she thinks, tears sliding down her face unchecked, at least they don’t say anything.

***

She is done crying when she reaches the other side. Vaguely, she’s glad she has no makeup left to smear, though her eyes feel swollen and itchy nevertheless. It doesn’t help that the air here is dank and close, the moisture in it pressing against her face. The walls press in closely too, she realizes; she can reach out around her and touch them without having to take a step, and above her the ceiling is perhaps only a foot above her head. The smell of earth is everywhere, and she cannot see anything.

 _I am buried alive_. The thought occurs and reverberates through her before she can stop it.

She is alive, though. And when she reaches out blindly in front of her, there is no wall there. So she walks forward.

Scritching noises in the darkness have her reaching for her music again. She knows it’s stupid to drown them out instead of trying to keep track of them, but she doesn’t care. She is stumbling, disoriented, terrified, her head still feels too light. The grounding strains of guitar and a woman’s voice are all that is keeping her moving forward, and she cranks the music up so loud she can’t hear anything else.

Something tugs at the shoulder of her dress. She shrieks, slaps at it, but it just tugs harder. Another pull, from her other side down by her hip. She knows what they want.

“Why?!” she shrieks at them, angry and as loud as she can go. She can’t hear their response over her music but she knows what it must be. Way of the underworld.

Shuddering more with rage than disgust, thankful for the dark so she can’t tell what the creatures in front of her look like, she pulls her dress over her head. She is left with a bra, panties, and her iPod clutched in her hand in a deathgrip. She feels them take the dress from her hand, and in front of her there is light.

***

She stumbles through the last gate, disoriented, cold and almost naked, and feels her arms grabbed, roughly, before her eyes can even adjust. When she’s able to look up at the people who have wrapped crushingly strong grips around her biceps, all the air goes out of her in a furious, incredulous gasp.

“How dare you use their faces.”

It isn’t Erica and Boyd. She isn’t stupid, she knows what the blankness of their eyes and the faint wrongness in the set of their mouths means. These are the same two gatekeepers who have followed her the whole way, and this is no more their true form than the frog was. But here at the final step, they have decided to play nasty. These faces have been crafted, carefully molded, to hurt her.

It’s working.

“How dare you. They deserve peace, not you ghouls wearing their skins.” She wanted to yell it, but her throat is still raw from screaming back in the tunnel. It comes out a rage-filled snarl instead.

The song on her iPod ends. The next one doesn’t start. She looks down to see she’s at the end of the playlist, and into the silence, someone says:

“Peace. That’s what you think this place is about?”

The room she is in is dark red clay, disturbingly like a womb. Across from her is a throne of yellowed bones, skulls on the armrests and sharpened ribs rising towards the ceiling, and from that throne a figure stands. She crosses to Lydia in three quick strides and smacks her across the face. The impact is so sudden and painful that tears spring to hear eyes immediately, and if she wasn’t being held in place, Lydia would probably have fallen.

“Stupid girl,” the woman says to her as she raises a hand to her stinging, warm cheek. Lydia blinks water out of the way meets the eyes of a tall woman with short, dark red hair and a red slash of a mouth, severe. Her sharp cheekbones stand out like knives, the same clenched, stretched bone structure she remembers from Allison’s face after her mother died.

“Mrs. Argent, a pleasure as always,” Lydia says sweetly, her long-abandoned “charming the parents” tone.

Victoria Argent curls her lip. Lydia was the recipient of that look a lot while she was alive, actually. Mrs. Argent thought she was pathetic because she wore cute skirts and liked taking pictures on her phone. She thought Lydia was everything she didn’t want her child to be: frivolous, selfish, sexual, weak. Lydia is all of those things and more. Lydia is alive and Victoria Argent is dead, and this is not really her.

“I am in pain, little girl. I don’t have time for you today,” says Mrs. Argent. Lydia knows it for the ritual opening it is, and takes a deep breath. She has never felt beholden to the story that to be a woman she must be kind and empathetic; has never been the person to reach out and ask for other people’s feelings and struggles. She thinks it’s a ploy, made up to weigh women down with the burdens of others so they can’t achieve their potential.

She also knows it’s the only way she’s getting out of here alive.

“I’m sorry you’re in pain,” she says, and really tries to mean it.

Mrs. Argent laughs at her.

“If you were sorry you wouldn’t have dug down into my flesh like this, you horrible little burrowing parasite.”

“I can regret causing pain even if I think it was necessary,” Lydia points out. And she does regret it, actually. She thinks about how it felt to be burrowed into, by Jackson’s lust and disgust and Peter’s creeping tendrils of purple and all of the sticky, covetous stares she gets on a daily basis. Violation is not who she wants to be.

“I didn’t know it would hurt you. I _am_ sorry.”

“As if your regret did anything to help.”

Lydia knows that tune too. Everyone was _sorry_ , after Peter. So guilty, so regretful, and so completely unwilling to actually accept blame. They were sorry but they didn’t want to hear what they’d done wrong, or fix it. They were sorry but they didn’t listen to her any more than they ever had.

Except Allison.

“Can I help?” She can count on one hand the times she’s made that offer sincerely, because her effort and energy are valuable and she doesn’t give them away freely. But something is happening here in this warm close red room with this woman and Lydia trapped by the dead. There is something in this person she recognizes.

“You cannot take my agony from me. You cannot scream my screams.”

Oh, that, that is where the queen of the dead is so very, very wrong. Lydia did not expect this, is not sure she _wants_ this, but she is here and she can feel it building in her throat.

“Yes I can,” she says, and she takes a deep breath and _screams._

It winds up from her feet, from her belly, from her lungs and her missing hair and the bruises being dug onto her arms. It pulls, and she can feel the other end of that tug heavy with the weight of the dead and the dirt, with an ache like menstrual cramps a thousand times worse, like being torn open just like Lydia was once. She screams and she feels a _world_ inside of it, bulging out of her throat, a fractal system of things she cannot wrap words around but understands. Her scream is the scream of coming out of the woods covered in dirt and blood and dust and feeling eyes on her aching, cold breasts. Her scream is the scream of purple dreams dragging her down, of blood and teeth. She screams childbirth, and death, and the midwife at both. She screams sacrifice sharp and bloody or slow and inexorable and a thousand swallowed words not appropriate for her lips. She screams the hard, brutal beat of being crushed under the earth and hands and stares and laughter. She screams running, and hiding, and the forever spurned. She screams pain as a fact, a function, a process, an inescapable truth.

She feels, when the sound finally stops ringing in her ears, that she has screamed for days.

“Thank you,” the queen of the dead tells her sweaty, drooping, exhausted head.

“I understand.” Lydia’s voice is a thread of sound but it feels important to say this, important that she know.

“Yes you do. I can take that understanding from you, if you would be free of it.”

“No.”

“I can give you a gift to take back with you then. What would you like? A child? A lover? The earth and men to open for your touch?”

“I want Allison,” she says, her voice a raw glass-ground croak. “I want Allison to come back with me alive.”

The guardians release her, suddenly. She drops to the ground, and her knees sting with the impact. When she looks up Victoria Argent is gone…and Allison is there, the clear solid fact of her like cool water on Lydia’s aching throat.

Allison is wearing the outfit she died in. She has no weapons, and her gaze is steady, calm, open, like it was at the best of times. She looks at Lydia like she does in Lydia’s dreams of saving her.

“Your hair,” is the first thing she hears Allison say, a long gasp that starts out astounded and ends up horrified as she realizes.

“It will grow back,” is the first thing Lydia says to her best friend since she died. She means the dismissiveness of the statement, too; who cares about her hair when Allison is in front of her, within reach?

Lydia’s hand shakes as she reaches out, and she can’t quite bring herself to touch. Her fingers hover just above the skin of Allison’s arm, and she can’t make them cross that last inch. Allison sees the desperate supplication in her gaze and she smiles, that easy understanding that always makes Lydia’s shoulders drop as if their burden has been lifted. Allison bridges the gap herself, reaches out and grabs Lydia’s fingers hard enough the tips turn white.

Her hand is warm. They both have scars in the shape of the Beacon Hills First National Bank logo, mirrored marks on their forearms that never faded, and they press together with the meeting of their hands. Lydia heaves in a huge breath and starts crying.

“You came to get me. You came to _get_ me.” Allison gathers Lydia in, pulls her face into her shoulder while Lydia sobs. “You came for me.” Kisses are pressed to the side of her head, her hair, her wet face.

“I love you.” The words hiccup out, gross and undignified and too long deferred. “I love you. But that’s…that’s not _why_ I’m here, I’m here to get you because you don’t belong here and you need to come home, and I just…I just _happen_ to love you, too.”

“I get it.”

She always does.

“The price,” not-Erica-and-Boyd say behind her.

“Take one leave one, I get it,” she says with her throat still thick with tears, rolls her eyes into Allison’s shoulder and feels it stiffen.

“You’re not staying in my place.” Allison’s hands tighten on her back, almost painful. Lydia luxuriates in it.

“Hell no.” She wipes her eyes on Allison’s skin, ineffectually, and straightens up. After a moment of silent reluctance, they let each other go enough that Lydia can turn around and face the guardians.

“Kira Yukimura,” they offer, dispassionately.

“Fuck no.” She knows it’s the ritual, that they have to ask, but she’s still insulted at the possibility being offered.

“Lorraine Martin.”

“No.”

“Scott McCall.”

“As if.”

“Jackson Whittemore.” After all this time, his name still comes up so soon? Ugh. Lydia is disappointed in herself and her feelings.

“I’m not that petty and he’s not that significant.”

“Peter Hale.”

And there it is. There it is and she feels all the breath leave her in a sigh of relief, because this, more than anything, was the part she was trusting to luck and guesswork. If his name hadn’t come up…if she’d been forced to make a different choice…but no. She understood correctly. It’s connection, not love, that matters. And she knows she has that connection, the bond she feels in echoes of bloody furrows dragged through her skin. Her wounds are weapons now. They always have been, just waiting for their chance to strike.

“Yes. Take him,” she says, vicious and giddy. All they do is incline their heads, and then turn and walk away.

“We can go now?” she asks their retreating backs, and doesn’t get an answer. But when they leave the room it’s like something breaks, both inside her and in the air around her. She sags a little in Allison’s grip and, vaguely, wonders how long she’s been down here without food or water. She wonders if Kira has gone for help yet.

“You okay?” Allison asks. Lydia manages to flail around in her arms until they’re facing each other again and she’s able to drink in her face. Allison is pale. Lydia is the one in her underwear, but Allison is shivering.

“Are _you_ okay?” she asks, leans their foreheads together in silent comfort.

“Can’t believe this is happening.”

“This was going to happen from the minute I lost you,” Lydia tells her, firm and strident as if she never had a moment of despair or doubt. She fishes for her headphones, her iPod clutched in her hand the way it has been this whole way down, and offers Allison one earbud. Allison takes it, that big wide smile that didn’t happen enough in the months before her death lighting up her face.

Their heads nestle together, orange and brown, and they start walking.

 


End file.
